Adept saves costs at British Energy

Adept Scientific helps British Energy to improve the reliability and flexibility of its Chemistry condition monitoring system using Quality Monitor from Northwest Analytical (NWA).

Supplying around 18 per cent of the UK's electricity generating capacity, British Energy were looking for a monitoring system that would be capable of running sophisticated analysis programs, as well as being financially viable and allow for continual development.

At around one tenth the cost of alternative solutions, Quality Monitor from NWA was the clear solution to replacing its LIMS system.

'As important as the power of the new system was its flexibility and ease of use,' said Gary Brodt, a contracted systems support engineer within one of the company's Chemistry sections.

'This meant that during system development chemists with little or no database experience could learn enough of the package to make interface modifications in order to deliver a system that exactly matched day-to-day requirements.' NWA Quality Monitor is used for shop floor data collection and statistical process control.

The package allows standardised workflow processes to be built to match the needs of a specific facility, stores data from multiple workstations in a central database and provides live charting and analysis of quality data.

Quality Analyst offers functionality for data analysis and reporting.

Brodt and his team have continued to make minor modifications to the system since its implementation as more historical data is migrated to the new platform and additional plant signals are added - all with no disruption to users.

Work is now underway on the next phase that will integrate more of NWA Quality Analyst's capabilities in order to produce bespoke data analysis to allow both plant personnel and corporate staff to gain a rapid, detailed overview of plant performance.

Brodt said: 'The NWA software from Adept Scientific can capture live data at the source where the data is generated, then analyse the data in the office that is remote to all of the labs.

'Monthly reporting has been made more streamlined and training on use of the system is much easier than any of the other LIMS systems.

'Further development will provide even more improvements to our Statistical Process Control analysis to highlight what part of the plant may be trending towards fault conditions.' NWA Quality Monitor and NWA Quality Analyst are supplied and supported in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Nordic countries by Adept Scientific.

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